A New Way To Build -- And Spend -- Social Capital

Seems you can't have a chat with anyone in Digitopolis these days without invoking ... communities. The trend toward virtual neighborhoods, localities, villages, societies and what have you is most certainly on the bleating edge.

Scott Gerber and Ryan Paugh hope to push the boundaries of communities a bit further. The founders of Young Entrepreneur Council, an invitation-only group of support and mentorship, think this sort of fellowship (and galship) shouldn't be used merely to push a brand or a company agenda. They're not so crazy about what they call "vanity metrics" -- racking up Facebook likes and Twitter followers -- either. Making connections should have the aim of forming lasting relationships, with mutual benefits -- data in service of helpful engagement and, perhaps, a burst of innovation as a result. With that in mind, they're launching CommunityCo in early January 2015.

This basic idea didn't arrive yesterday, as any hammer-and-chisel carrying archaeologist will tell you. They've long identified communities as the oldest form of social organization. The earliest probably dates back 9,000 years or so to the town of Jericho. Before Joshua and the walls that came tumbling down there was a cluster of mud-and-brick huts occupied by perhaps 2,000 souls. What distinguished them was that they weren't directly involved in the production of sustenance; they'd moved on from hunter-gatherers and farmers to become the Neolithic equivalent of urban dwellers. Instead of merely producing food for themselves, they became artisans -- potters, jewelers, metal-benders -- religious leaders and politicians. Trade between villagers and villages almost certainly sparked such breakthroughs as bronze tools, the plow and the wheel and, at some point, the earliest forms of writing.

In the millennia since then, the idea of communities has been hijacked by a variety of political and religious interests, sociologists, economists (including Messrs. Engel and Marx) and activists. Not to mention the thousands of quilting and cooking groups, music, chess and book clubs, fantasy sports teams -- and everyone else who's found common cause with others outside standard tribal and family ties. Even the word, "community," is ancient, deriving from the Latin, communis (or things in common); its first use in our tongue likely dates to around 1380, by John Wycliffe, a theologian best known for encouraging a translation of the Latin (or Vulgate) Bible into vernacular English. His notion of community was a body of people organized into a social, municipal or political group.

What on earth could be new about communities? You never know what creative interaction among ambitious people can spark.